The Real Problem With Republicans

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I was going to spend a lot of time wading through the forensic self-examination and ritual self-abuse that the Republicans performed in public yesterday in an attempt to convince Americans that they've learned something over the past several election cycles. But that would have required me to take the document — and the sentiments therein — seriously and, frankly, I think it makes more sense to have prehistory explained to you by The Most Awesome Man On Television.

How do I know this? Because, within the Republican caucus in the House Of Representatives, Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin and the first runner-up in the most recent vice-presidential pageant, is presently being cast as the worst kind of RINO by a guy who believes that everything they taught him in med school are lies from the pit of hell, a creationist nutball who's even money to be the next senator from the state of Georgia. And, I guarantee you, within weeks, you will hear that Paul Ryan — who wants to kill Medicare through slow starvation rather than immediate disembowelment — will represent the "moderate" Republican position, and that the Democrats should meet him halfway.

(By the way, was there even a conversation among the op-ed editors at the Times to the effect of, "Hey, isn't this the lies-from-the-pit-of-hell guy? Why are we giving him a platform? He's pretty nuts." Never mind. I know the answer.)

The Republicans are not going to change in any substantive way for two very good reasons: one, they can't. (See above.) Their base is a mixture of crazy ideas and lunatic independence, and now the crazy ideas and lunatic independence are independently financed, and the politicians they produce instantly walk into safe congressional districts that have become ironclad locked wards; and two, they don't really want to. As is obvious, they've forced the debate so far to the right, and so distant from the confines of intellectual gravity that our politics have become utterly unmoored. The ur-lunacy of the modern Republican party is represented by the crazy bass-ackwards theories of economics which they have come to adopt as an unshakable faith. Bear in mind — supply-side theory, which was blessed at birth by Saint Ronnie Himself, is no less nutty and distant from reality than is Paul Broun's view on how the earth was made and whence come the snowflake Jesus babies. It's the original anti-science position that made all the others possible. It's the gate through which all the more baroque ideas were delivered. It's how a scenario actually can be constructed whereby Paul Ryan is the liberal alternative. And it is the one part of the Reagan legacy that the party can never give up.

If the party really were committed to changing itself, it would encourage within its ranks a real economic debate over whether the fanatical adherence to an economic philosophy that was concocted on a cocktail napkin almost 40 years ago is really where the entire party wants to plant the flag forever. It would debate seriously whether it is time now to lay the ghost of Imaginary Reagan. And a thousand Republican politicians say, in response — "OK, you first, Ace."